I am lacking the converter for my oldest (and use a generic one)... but it's a 1986 model with the original black AT cable) - it's "birthdate label" is in a pic in our blog post. I had an older one (16 days older) which I gave to my mom with a new computer - somewhere around 2 decades ago. She's went through 5 computers... same keyboard.:-)

Most of my other ones are a bit younger. This one (that I type on now) was born on Feb 5, 1996 in the UK (my only UK keyboard). A few other Model M's and three M13's

Yeah - when you only have one finger on each hand, and the torn muscles in your right shoulder prevent you from moving your right hand to the left, I can see how Ctrl+V would be harder than Shift+Insert.

Maybe if you are using a 20+ year old legacy system Shift+Insert would be useful, but beyond that....?

And reach even more to get to Esc to get between insert and command mode? On a modern keyboard you can live in insert mode most of the time since movement, insert/delete, etc. all have hard keys. The embedded movement keys were the bees' knees on an ancient terminal lacking in cursor keys but we have better stuff now.

It's the reverse for me. The Insert key is so close to the Delete key that I sometimes hit it by accident. What does anyone need the Insert key for?

Hey guys, scroll lock and pause/break are useless!Also, this control key? What's the point of that?!

Protip: Every key on the keyboard is useful. Just because you and your programs don't make use of a key doesn't mean you should have any input about the layout of my input devices.

Real talk: Got Excel? Click a cell, use the arrow keys. Hit scroll lock. Click a cell, use the arrow keys. HOLY SHIT A FUNCTION FOR A KEY YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT. (Might work in Calc. I wouldn't know, since I'm not a masochi

"If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop."

Sorry, I have never been so pissed of in my/. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".

People that don't use the whole keyboard and key combos have no idea how much productivity they are throwing away. That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.

"If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop."

Sorry, I have never been so pissed of in my/. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".

People that don't use the whole keyboard and key combos have no idea how much productivity they are throwing away. That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.

Additionally, those of us accustomed to working with *nix operating systems know that CTRL-INS and SHIFT-INS are handy combinations for copy & paste, especially when you don't want to actually send CTRL characters to the terminal. And they work in Windows, too. Speaking of which... Timothy, what would you recommend as an alternative to the 'three-finger salute'?

know that CTRL-INS and SHIFT-INS are handy combinations for copy & paste, especially when you don't want to actually send CTRL characters to the terminal. as an alternative to the 'three-finger salute'?

I worked for a dude one time that used Linux and Windows frequently. He also used the keyboard to do everything about 90 percent of the time. He would only default to the mouse if it was absolutely necessary to do so. I never went to his house myself, but other coworkers went there and told me some stories. He apparently had a Sailor Moon bed spread on his mattress and there was a plastic bed accessory he sported that made his entire bed look like a race car. Red race car mattress, Sailor Moon bed spread. C

True, I remember the game going black for a second and the start menu popping up, and then thinking "Shit."

But seriously, one thing Microsoft did get right is that they pretty much reserved the windows-key as a system-wide shortcut key. Start-D (desktop), Start-L (lock), Start-R (run), Start-F (find), Start-E (explorer). I *love* those key bindings.

Contrast with Mac's F9, F10, F11 and F12 keys. If your program just happens to use one of those keys, you're shit-out-of-luck (as is the case when trying to debug something in Visual Studio in a virtual machine, for example).

Well I don't know about mere mortals, but I use a command line every time, and always make up some crazy regular expression to do it just so I can show off my maaaad skillz.

But seriously, I use all the keys on the keyboard, except some of the F# keys. IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key. That is a useless key. Is there really someone out there that runs a windows desktop and does not use a mouse or lacks the abilit

> IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.

Useless keys are very valuable if you think outside the box. Map it to a compose key. Or use it as a special key for things like virtual machines instead of having to make do with chording a bunch of the buckybits. Of course if one is stuck on stupid (i.e. Windows) then there probably isn't much use for a useless key.

There's no such thing as a useless key; there's only a key you haven't properly remapped in order to exploit. (For Windows NT 4/2000/XP/Vista/7, hunt down use KeyTweak and the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.)

If you think the "context menu" key is useless, can I assume you've never had to navigate Windows on a computer where the mouse is missing or broken? I never plan on using a windows machine without a mouse, but I have had several situations where I was stuck without a functioning mouse, and some developer(Microsoft or someone else) stuck some very important function in a context menu.

IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.

I use the Context key frequently. For example, if you're typing in Word and the spell checker identifies a mistake (red squiggle), I can put my cursor inside the word and use the Context key to pull up the spell check results. This is far faster than grabbing the mouse to use a right-click.

Likewise with working on files. I often navigate to folders and open them without using the mouse. The Context key lets me "right click" whatever I have selected so that I can send it to a USB drive, email it as an attachment, or open it with an alternative program.

I would say it gets far more use than the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock combined.

Shift F10... works just as well, and since near the "beginning of time" (GUI/Windows/OS.2 speaking).
It's the reason I despise new keyboards with their extra keys (and reduced spacebar sizes). Any decent typist is more than capable of hitting CTRL-ESC or Shift-F10 or the rest of the pre-existing key combinations.
Though, yes, I do understand the benefit to the "not so savvy" computer user, or to the newer generation of computer users who don't realize that virtually all this stuff has had keyboard shortcu

I run into the very occasional software package where pressing 'insert' does not put the damn thing in overstrike mode. If I want to replace text, I'll highlight it. It's not even overstrike mode that's really the problem, it's how easy it is to accidentally activate something that's so rarely desired.

If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop.

I use constants but I hate caps lock.1st, It's really easy to bump by accident.2nd, when I type in constants, I often use underscores in them, far more frequently than numerals.

I would like a good old mechanical shift lock. Something with a solid click to it so it's harder to accidentally engage.When I type in constants, I hold one finger on the shift key and make do with the remaining three fingers on my left hand. I find that much easier than the decidedly odd behaviour.

I use constants but I hate caps lock.
1st, It's really easy to bump by accident.

2nd, when I type in constants, I often use underscores in them, far more frequently than numerals.

I would like a good old mechanical shift lock.

Something with a solid click to it so it's harder to accidentally engage.

When I type in constants, I hold one finger on the shift key and make do with the remaining three fingers on my left hand. I find that much easier than the decidedly odd behaviour.

Get an IBM Model M [aibpc.com]. The keycap has a chunk taken out of it next to the "A" key to make it more difficult to accidentally hit. Actually, all the keys are pretty much more difficult to accidentally hit due to the key design/layout (deeper left-right curves on the keycaps, generous "V" spacing between each key, etc), curvature of the layout (stepped rows), tactile/mechanical aspect, etc... and of course, they make great bludgeoning weapons that you can still use afterwards to type up the suicide note of the pe

I already fixed one annoyance in the kernel in an extremely simple patch that I've been applying for years. I don't want console blanking and I never found a reliable userspace solution to turn it off so I just changed the default in the kernel. Now it never bothers me.

> I don't want console blanking and I never found a reliable userspace solution to turn it off...

Man setterm.

Specifically, add setterm -powersave off to something like rc.local and forget about it. Sure as hell beats using a custom kernel vs your distro's better maintained one just for that. Of course if you are running a custom kernel anyway, guess one more patch doesn't hurt anything.

That's in my rc.local... fixes the damn issue. Really, happy-trigger kernel-patching is a bad solution, and goes against the beauty of Unix. You have an extremely powerful operating system, amazingly flexible, where you can do just about everything you need. Use it. Applying a kernel patch to change some userland behavior is the kind of ugly-hack I would expect from microsoft, not from GNU/Linux.

Someday I want to do the same thing with num lock. I want it to be ON all the time with no possibility of turning it off ever.

I saw some solutions for that and tried them. Then when connecting to another machine via VNC I noticed that on the other side the numlock wasn't active and I had to press it locally to activate it remotely... but since I'd removed the capability locally I was screwed. So now I just live with it and press the damn caps-lock after boot.

I work in the Employment office in Gresham, Oregon USA. I help people use computers. In order to get unemployment checks in Oregon, all applicants have to complete this long questionaire on a PC about their occupational skills, work history, and personal status. People can do this on-line or come into our 'worksource center' and use the computers that we have here. And I'm supposed to help them. (I get minimum wage for this and no benefits. Nnot that that is important. I just want you to know that I'm not a highly paid government employee)The information is supposed to match the unemployed with the jobs that all the companies in Oregon have available.

Not a bad concept except for two things. There are no jobs, and, about half of the people coming through the process can't use computers. And about 15-20% of the people can't speak english and have never, ever, ever used a computer before. I am not bullshitting you about this. It seems like a fantasy to highly-educated young Slashdaughters like yourself, but I assure you that this is the case in the lower-middle class neighborhoods of the USA (and probably the rest of the world as well).

So I get a lot of people who have never typed on a keyboard before. And they get put in front of a keyboard that was designed for advanced professional word-processing business typists of the early 1980's era. A lot of them must feel like they've been abducted by space aliens, especially the ones who have come from pre-industrial cultures and have been doing 'under the table' unskilled construction labor or fruit picking.

I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys on the PC keyboard that there are presently. And get rid of the fucking Num-lock key and the stupid Caps-Lock key!

> I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys> on the PC keyboard that there are presently.

So to please uneducated non computer users who don't own or use computers, we who do know how to use all the keys on a modern keyboard should be forced to endure a crippled user interface. Lemme guess, Obama voter.

Trust me, every key is needed with the possible exception of caps and num lock. Numlock is just there as a legacy from the old 84 key keyboard and could be eliminated... except a lot of

Trust me, every key is needed with the possible exception of caps and num lock.

I use the HappyHacker keyboard and that has a LOT keys less. http://houghi.org/shots/hh.jpg [houghi.org]So how come I am able to do the same things that other people are able to do with more keys? (Yes, even the KVM stuff)

My pre-information age grandfather, who trained and worked as an electronics engineer btw, had a similar problem upon first encountering a VCR remote. The first stage was confusion, the last stage was acceptance, but somewhere in the middle (before he got used to the thing) he came up with the idea of marketing slip-covers for VCR remotes that had a few windows on them so you could press the PLAY, STOP, and FF/REWIND, without having all those extra buttons in the way to confuse you. Doesn't make sense for r

I don't really care much about caps lock, which is only very rarely useful. But the Delete key??? How do you delete stuff (files, icons,...) without it? How do you delete right of the cursor instead of left?

Already, Page Up/Down and Home/End are gone on many notebook keyboards, making simple stuff like select to the start/end of line (Shift-Home / Shift-End) too clumsy to be useful when you need to hold a third Fn key simultaneously. And selecting to the end of the document becomes almost impossible.

I mean this is the second story on this amazing saga of whether the Chrome OS will have caps lock. Are any of the techies who visit this site going to buy a laptop that can only run one program (Chrome) and can't be modified?

> Are any of the techies who visit this site going to buy a laptop that can only run one program and can't be modified?

Don't bet on that last bit. I'm totally stoked about Chrome but not because I actually want such a retarded thing. How long have we been waiting for ARM based netbooks? Just when it looked like the Year of Linux on the Netbook was here and would soon abandon the power guzzling Atom for a more sensible ARM, Wintel threw its weight around and netbooks vanished. Hint: if it isn't cheap, small, light, flash based and netcentric it ain't a netbook. What the marketing folks are branding as netbooks these days are three pounds plus and have hard hard drives loaded with Windows. Well now here comes ARM based hardware just waiting to get repurposed to running a more general purpose netbook environment. And rooted it will be, just like every Android product has been rooted.

It is also a limited run prototype intended to seed the developer market. If Google puts a stupid Atom into the production hardware I'll lose all respect for them. It runs one application and one plugin. It is ported to ARM as is Flash. Intel hopes to someday (maybe even next year... yeah right) get idle power consumption down to under a watt. You can get some pretty nice ARM SoC solutions that top out at a watt. And that is for everything but the backlight, not just the CPU. These prototypes are three fracking pounds. If that is anything like what is going to ship Google can pack it in now and save everyone the bother.

Not to mention that if it ships with Intel Inside the pricetag is going to be right in with the modern Windows based netbooks and again, why bother? If they aren't planning to deliver them at retail to end users for $200 in WiFi or free with a 3G data plan then again, Google is far less savy than I have been giving them credit for. To hit those pricepoints ARM is the only option. Intel has no plans to offer a SoC solution anytime in the next couple of years and there are multiple ARM based solutions shipping that have CPU+GPU+3G+WiFi+Bluetooth+Power on the same chip and you can get SoC+RAM+FLASH on a very small module.

Powered by a nVidia Tegra 2 processor and a special version of Android.

However, reviews haven't been kind on it:http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/ [reghardware.com] 10/100"The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that I'm heart-broken by Toshiba's cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long en

>"If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop."

There are many reasons one might need or want a Caps-lock key and it doesn't and shouldn't be hidden away. I often need one when coding and doing certain types of data entry. I certainly find it a lot more valuable than the apparently mandated, non-standard, changing, "my this" and "my that"

How do you switch your cursor from insert to overwrite mode? How do you delete characters on the right hand side of the cursor? How would you easily delete a line via keyboard (CTRL+DELETE).

What about ctrl+delete (cut)
what about ctrl+insert (paste)
What about CTRL+ALT+DELETE?

Did you actually think about how others use the keys before you so cavalierly decided to banish a key? And why pick on insert delete when there is so much more low hanging fruit? Why not pick on F9-F12? Scroll lock?! Or the duplicated forward slashes or pipe key? Who uses tilde or grave!? And I guess we couldn't get rid of one set or the other of the windows keys?

Personally, I cannot dispense with a single key for me or my clients. If I'm on a support call the last thing I want to hear is "I don't have a delete key" –

“Oh they can right click on the task bar!”

No! They cannot, there is no taskbar!. You might as well upload a virus that prevents you from accessing the windows task manager. Please let's think about the children, they'll be supporting windows XP until they die, let’s give them a easy way to log on to the machine.

I hope all these forward thinking kids think about the repercussions of their actions before we end up with a crappy cell phone keyboard hooked up to a Cray 32.

No, really, I use it frequently. Not just to post inane l33tspeak to the interwebs either. I mean I really do use the thing as part of my daily life. I deal with a few hundred part numbers, many of them are long numbers, sprinkled with letters in there.. My left hand hit the caps lock and my right hand jumps to the numpad and I'm pecking out E5-FU7-Z009A001 etc for a few lines... Natural, easy. The way the keyboard has been used for... Well decades, getting rid of the caps lock is even dumber than adding "windows" keys and whatever other crap we added to go from 101 to 10-Whatever we're at now. Key combinations are more suited for those extra functions.

I am in a similar situation. What really pains me is basically the CAPS lock key is being used to sole a software problem. If the software was worth a damn, it would do it automatically. The stuff I write does, that's for damn sure.